Tempus fugit.

18^th September 2014.   24^th March 2016.  Recall these dates?   

The first one was the date of the legally binding irreversible referendum on Scottish independence.    

The second date is the date the SNP said Scotland would be out of the UK.   

After almost three hundred years of integration, 553 days were all that were needed to un-pick all the trade, parliamentary, legal intricacies of the Act of Union.     

So how depressing of Philip Hammond to announce today that it was now "physically impossible" for the UK to leave the EU on the 29th March.  1,009 days.  Twice as long to leave the EU even though we have been in the EEC / EU for only forty years.   

So what have Mr Hammond and Mrs May been doing if the increasingly hapless Scottish government could do their deal in such short time scale?